Tag: containers

Container images usually come with pre-defined tools or services with minimal or limited possibilities of further configuration. This brought us into a way of thinking of how to provide images that contain reasonable default settings but are, at the same time, easy to extend. And to make it more fun, this would be possible to achieve both on a single Linux host and in an orchestrated OpenShift environment.

Source-to-image (S2I) has been introduced three years ago to allow developers to build containerized applications by simply providing source code as an input. So why couldn’t we use it to make configuration files as an input instead? We can, of course!

Continue reading “Flexible Images or Using S2I for Image Configuration”

With traditional virtualized infrastructure or Infrastructure-as-a-Service, it is common practice to regularly refresh instances back to a known good state. This provides confidence that the application workloads have the correct runtime configuration, no deltas are being introduced, and they can be relied upon to provide value for the business. In these cases, you might use tools such as Ansible or Jenkins, but when we move our application workloads to containers running on OpenShift Container Platform, we can use native tools provided by that platform to achieve the same result.

As of version 3.2.0, Keycloak has the ability to act as an “authorization service” for Docker authentication. This means that the Keycloak IDP server can perform identity validation and token issuance when a Docker registry requires authentication. Administrators may now leverage the same user base, audit controls, and configuration mechanisms in Keycloak to extend their SSO ecosystem past OpenID Connect and SAML to cover Docker registries. The chart below illustrates how this flow works:

I’ve started an interesting exploration on the integration of Microsoft Windows Containers and Linux Containers in an OCP Environment. This allows a true bi-modal IT technical implementation by combining the strength of both platforms into one cluster.

Continue reading “First steps in integration of Windows and Linux Containers in OpenShift”